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MediaWiki
| latest_release_version = | latest_release_date = | discontinued = | programming language = PHP 7.2+ | operating system = Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, NetWare | platform = | size = ~37 MB (compressed) | language count = 428 | language footnote = | genre = Wiki | license = GPLv2+ | alexa = | website = | standard = | AsOf = | bodystyle = width:323px }} MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki engine. It was developed for use on Wikipedia in 2002, and given the name "MediaWiki" in 2003. It remains in use on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites continue to define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWiki. MediaWiki was originally developed by Magnus Manske and improved by Lee Daniel Crocker.Magnus Manske's announcement of "PHP Wikipedia", wikipedia-l, 2001-08-24 Its development has since then been coordinated by the Wikimedia Foundation. MediaWiki is written in the PHP programming language and stores all text content into a database. The software is optimized to efficiently handle large projects, which can have terabytes of content and hundreds of thousands of hits per second. Because Wikipedia is one of the world's largest websites, achieving scalability through multiple layers of caching and database replication has been a major concern for developers. Another major aspect of MediaWiki is its internationalization; its interface is available in more than 300 languages. The software has more than 900 configuration settings and more than 1,900 extensions available for enabling various features to be added or changed. Besides its use on Wikimedia sites, MediaWiki has been used as a knowledge management and content management system on many thousands of websites, public and private, including the websites Fandom and wikiHow, and major internal installations like Intellipedia and Diplopedia. License MediaWiki is free and open-source software and is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version. Its documentation, located at www.mediawiki.org, is released under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license and partly in the public domain. Specifically, the manuals and other content at MediaWiki.org are Creative Commons-licensed, while the set of help pages intended to be freely copied into fresh wiki installations and/or distributed with MediaWiki software is public domain. This was done to eliminate legal issues arising from the help pages being imported into wikis with licenses that are incompatible with the Creative Commons license. MediaWiki development has generally favored the use of open-source media formats. Development MediaWiki has an active volunteer community for development and maintenance. Users who have made meaningful contributions to the project by submitting patches are generally, upon request, granted access to commit revisions to the project's Git/Gerrit repository. There are also paid programmers who primarily develop projects for the Wikimedia Foundation. MediaWiki developers participate in the Google Summer of Code by facilitating the assignment of mentors to students wishing to work on MediaWiki core and extension projects. During the year prior to November 2012, there were about two hundred developers who had committed changes to the MediaWiki core or extensions. Approximate counts (not deduplicated) as of 2012-11-04: 139 for core, 155 for extensions supported by WMF, 190 and 42 for extensions only hosted on WMF's Git and SVN repositories respectively. Major MediaWiki releases are generated approximately every six months by taking snapshots of the development branch, which is kept continuously in a runnable state; minor releases, or point releases, are issued as needed to correct bugs (especially security problems). MediaWiki also has a public bug tracker, phabricator.wikimedia.org, which runs Phabricator. The site is also used for feature and enhancement requests. History in 2012]] in 2008]] When Wikipedia was first launched in January 2001, it ran on the existing wiki software UseModWiki, which is written in Perl and stores all wiki pages in text files. This software soon proved limiting, both in its functionality and its performance. In mid-2001, Magnus Manske, a developer and student at the University of Cologne, who was also a Wikipedia editor, began working on new software that would replace UseModWiki, specifically for use by Wikipedia. This software was written in PHP and stored all its information in a MySQL database. The software was mostly complete by August 24 and a test wiki for it was established shortly thereafter. The first full implementation of this software was the new Meta Wikipedia on November 9, 2001. There was a desire to have it implemented immediately on the English Wikipedia, but Manske was worried about potential bugs harming the nascent website while he had finals immediately prior to Christmas and its launch on the English Wikipedia was delayed to January 25, 2002. The software was then gradually deployed on all the Wikipedia language sites of that time. This software was referred to as "the PHP script" and as "phase II", with the name "phase I" retroactively given to the use of UseModWiki. Increasing usage soon caused load problems again, and soon afterward, another rewrite of the software began, done by Lee Daniel Crocker, which was first known as "phase III". This new software was also written in PHP with a MySQL backend, and kept the basic interface of the phase II software, but was meant to be more scalable. It went live on Wikipedia in July 2002. The Wikimedia Foundation was announced on June 20, 2003, and in July, Wikipedia contributor Daniel Mayer suggested the name "MediaWiki" for the software, as a play on "Wikimedia". The name was gradually phased in beginning in August 2003. The name has frequently caused confusion due to its (intentional) similarity to the "Wikimedia" name (which itself is similar to "Wikipedia"). The product logo was created by Erik Möller using a flower photograph taken by Florence Nibart-Devouard, and was originally submitted to the logo contest for a new Wikipedia logo, held in mid-2003. The logo came in third place, and was chosen to represent MediaWiki instead of Wikipedia, with the second place logo used for the Wikimedia Foundation. The double square brackets symbolize the syntax MediaWiki uses for creating hyperlinks to other wiki pages, and the sunflower represents the diversity of content on Wikipedia, the constant growth and also the wildness. Later, , the Chief Technical Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, took up the role of release manager and most active developer. Major milestones in MediaWiki's development have included the categorization system, added in 2004; Parser Functions, added in 2006; Flagged Revisions, added in 2008; the "ResourceLoader", a delivery system for CSS and JavaScript, added in 2011; and the VisualEditor, a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, added in 2013. Version history The first version of MediaWiki, 1.1, was released in December 2003. Sites using MediaWiki also makes use of MediaWiki.]] MediaWiki's most famous use has been in Wikipedia and, to a lesser degree, the Wikimedia Foundation's other projects. Fandom, a wiki hosting service formerly known as Wikia, runs on MediaWiki. Other public wikis that run on MediaWiki include wikiHow and SNPedia. WikiLeaks began as a MediaWiki-based site, but is no longer a wiki. A number of alternative wiki encyclopedias to Wikipedia run on MediaWiki, including Citizendium, Metapedia, Scholarpedia and Conservapedia. MediaWiki is also used internally by a large number of companies, including Novell and Intel.MediaWiki testimonials , mediawiki.org Notable usages of MediaWiki within governments include Intellipedia, used by the United States Intelligence Community, Diplopedia, used by the United States Department of State, and milWiki, a part of milSuite used by the United States Department of Defense. United Nations agencies such as the United Nations Development Programme and INSTRAW chose to implement their wikis using MediaWiki, because "this software runs Wikipedia and is therefore guaranteed to be thoroughly tested, will continue to be developed well into the future, and future technicians on these wikis will be more likely to have exposure to MediaWiki than any other wiki software." The Free Software Foundation uses MediaWiki to implement the LibrePlanet site. Key features MediaWiki provides a rich core feature set and a mechanism to attach extensions to provide additional functionality. Internationalization and localisation Due to the strong emphasis on multilingualism in the Wikimedia projects, internationalization and localization has received significant attention by developers. The user interface has been fully or partially translated into more than 300 languages on translatewiki.net,See also: Translation statistics and Multilingual MediaWiki. and can be further customized by site administrators (the entire interface is editable through the wiki). Several extensions, most notably those collected in the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle, are designed to further enhance the multilingualism and internationalization of MediaWiki. Installation and configuration Installation of MediaWiki requires that the user have administrative privileges on a server running both PHP and a compatible type of SQL database. Some users find that setting up a virtual host is helpful if the majority of one's site runs under a framework (such as Zope or Ruby on Rails) that is largely incompatible with MediaWiki. Cloud hosting can enable a user to dispense with the task of building a new server by hand. An installation PHP script is accessed via a Web browser to initialize the wiki's settings. It prompts the user for a minimal set of required parameters, leaving further changes, such as enabling uploads, adding a site logo, and installing extensions, to be made by modifying configuration settings contained in a file called LocalSettings.php. Some aspects of MediaWiki can be configured through special pages or by editing certain pages; for instance, abuse filters can be configured through a special page, and certain gadgets can be added by creating JavaScript pages in the MediaWiki namespace. The MediaWiki community publishes a comprehensive installation guide. Markup One of the earliest differences between MediaWiki (and its predecessor, UseModWiki) and other wiki engines was the use of "free links" instead of CamelCase. When MediaWiki was created, it was typical for wikis to require text like "WorldWideWeb" to create a link to a page about the World Wide Web; links in MediaWiki, on the other hand, are created by surrounding words with double square brackets, and any spaces between them are left intact, e.g. . This change was logical for the purpose of creating an encyclopedia, where accuracy in titles is important. MediaWiki uses an extensible lightweight wiki markup designed to be easier to use and learn than HTML. Tools exist for converting content such as tables between MediaWiki markup and HTML. Efforts have been made to create a MediaWiki markup spec, but a consensus seems to have been reached that Wikicode requires context-sensitive grammar rules. The following side-by-side comparison illustrates the differences between wiki markup and HTML: (Quotation above from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll) Editing interface MediaWiki's default page-editing tools have been described as somewhat challenging to learn. A survey of students assigned to use a MediaWiki-based wiki found that when they were asked an open question about main problems with the wiki, 24% cited technical problems with formatting, e.g. "Couldn't figure out how to get an image in. Can't figure out how to show a link with words; it inserts a number." To make editing long pages easier, MediaWiki allows the editing of a subsection of a page (as identified by its header). A registered user can also indicate whether or not an edit is minor. Correcting spelling, grammar or punctuation are examples of minor edits, whereas adding paragraphs of new text is an example of a non-minor edit. Sometimes while one user is editing, a second user saves an edit to the same part of the page. Then, when the first user attempts to save the page, an edit conflict occurs. The second user is then given an opportunity to merge his content into the page as it now exists following the first user's page save. MediaWiki's user interface has been localized in many different languages. A language for the wiki content itself can also be set, to be sent in the "Content-Language" HTTP header and "lang" HTML attribute. Application programming interface MediaWiki has an extensible web API (application programming interface) that provides direct, high-level access to the data contained in the MediaWiki databases. Client programs can use the API to log in, get data, and post changes. The API supports thin web-based JavaScript clients and end-user applications (such as vandal-fighting tools). The API can be accessed by the backend of another web site. An extensive Python bot library, Pywikibot, and a popular semi-automated tool called AutoWikiBrowser, also interface with the API. The API is accessed via URLs such as http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=recentchanges. In this case, the query would be asking Wikipedia for information relating to the last 10 edits to the site. One of the perceived advantages of the API is its language independence; it listens for HTTP connections from clients and can send a response in a variety of formats, such as XML, serialized PHP, or JSON. Client code has been developed to provide layers of abstraction to the API. Rich content s can be arranged in galleries, a feature that is used extensively for Wikimedia's media archive, Wikimedia Commons.]] MediaWiki supports rich content generated through specialized syntax. For example, the software comes with optional support for rendering mathematical formulas using LaTeX and a special parser written in OCaml. Similar functionality for other content, ranging from graphical timelines over mathematical plotting and musical scores to Egyptian hieroglyphs, is available via extensions. The software has become more powerful at dealing with a wide variety of uploaded media files. Its richest functionality is in the area of images, where image galleries and thumbnails can be generated with relative ease. There is also support for Exif metadata. The use of MediaWiki to operate the Wikimedia Commons, one of the largest free content media archives, has driven the need for further functionality in this area. Because any WYSIWYG editor would have to know wikitext grammar, and no full grammar for wikitext exists, MediaWiki currently provides no native WYSIWYG support. It does come with a customizable graphical toolbar for simplifying the process of learning the wiki syntax. Various extensions exist for handling WYSIWYG editing to different degrees. Tracking edits Among the features of MediaWiki to assist in tracking edits is a Recent Changes feature that provides a list of recent edits to the wiki. This list contains basic information about those edits such as the editing user, the edit summary, the page edited, as well as any tags (e.g. "possible malware link") added by customizable abuse filters and other extensions to aid in combating unhelpful edits. On more active wikis, so many edits occur that it is hard to track Recent Changes manually. Anti-vandal software, including user-assisted tools are sometimes employed on such wikis to process Recent Changes items. Server load can be reduced by sending a continuous feed of Recent Changes to an IRC channel that these tools can monitor, eliminating their need to send requests for a refreshed Recent Changes feed to the API. Another important tool is watchlisting. Each logged-in user has a watchlist to which the user can add whatever pages he or she wishes. When an edit is made to one of those pages, a summary of that edit appears on the watchlist the next time it is refreshed. As with the recent changes page, recent edits that appear on the watchlist contain clickable links for easy review of the article history and specific changes made. There is also capability to review all edits made by any particular user. In this way, if an edit is identified as problematic, it is possible to check the user's other edits for issues. MediaWiki allows one to link to specific versions of articles. This has been useful to the scientific community, in that expert peer reviewers could analyse articles, improve them and provide links to the trusted version of that article. Navigation Navigation through the wiki is largely through internal wikilinks. MediaWiki's wikilinks implement page existence detection, in which a link is colored blue if the target page exists on the local wiki and red if it does not. If a user clicks on a red link, they are prompted to create an article with that title. Page existence detection makes it practical for users to create "wikified" articles — that is, articles containing links to other pertinent subjects — without those other articles being yet in existence. Interwiki links function much the same way as namespaces. A set of interwiki prefixes can be configured to cause, for instance, a page title of wikiquote:Jimbo Wales to direct the user to the Jimbo Wales article on Wikiquote. Unlike internal wikilinks, interwiki links lack page existence detection functionality, and accordingly there is no way to tell whether a blue interwiki link is broken or not. Content organization Page tabs and associated pages Page tabs are displayed at the top of pages. These tabs allow users to perform actions or view pages that are related to the current page. The available default actions include viewing, editing, and discussing the current page. The specific tabs displayed depend on whether or not the user is logged into the wiki and whether the user has sysop privileges on the wiki. For instance, the ability to move a page or add it to one's watchlist is usually restricted to logged-in users. The site administrator can add or remove tabs by using JavaScript or installing extensions. Each page has an associated history page from which the user can access every version of the page that has ever existed and generate diffs between two versions of his choice. Users' contributions are displayed not only here, but also via a "user contributions" option on a sidebar. Carl Challborn & Teresa Reimann note that "While this feature may be a slight deviation from the collaborative, 'ego-less' spirit of wiki purists, it can be very useful for educators who need to assess the contribution and participation of individual student users." Namespaces MediaWiki provides many features beyond hyperlinks for structuring content. One of the earliest such features is namespaces. One of Wikipedia's earliest problems had been the separation of encyclopedic content from pages pertaining to maintenance and communal discussion, as well as personal pages about encyclopedia editors. Namespaces are prefixes before a page title (such as "User:" or "Talk:") that serve as descriptors for the page's purpose and allow multiple pages with different functions to exist under the same title. For instance, a page titled " ", in the default namespace, could describe the 1984 movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, while a page titled " " could be a profile describing a user who chooses this name as a pseudonym. More commonly, each namespace has an associated "Talk:" namespace, which can be used to discuss its contents, such as "User talk:" or "Template talk:". The purpose of having discussion pages is to allow content to be separated from discussion surrounding the content. Namespaces can be viewed as folders that separate different basic types of information or functionality. Custom namespaces can be added by the site administrators. There are 16 namespaces by default for content, with 2 "pseudo-namespaces" used for dynamically generated "Special:" pages and links to media files. Each namespace on MediaWiki is numbered: content page namespaces have even numbers and their associated talk page namespaces have odd numbers. Category tags Users can create new categories and add pages and files to those categories by appending one or more category tags to the content text. Adding these tags creates links at the bottom of the page that take the reader to the list of all pages in that category, making it easy to browse related articles. The use of categorization to organize content has been described as a combination of: * Collaborative tagging systems like del.icio.us and * Hierarchical classifications like the Dewey Decimal Classification. See also * List of content management systems * List of wiki software * Semantic MediaWiki * BlueSpice MediaWiki * XOWA — for viewing Wikipedia and other wikis offline References External links * , with Hubs for users, system administrators and developers. * Category:MediaWiki Category:Free content management systems Category:Free software programmed in PHP Category:Free wiki software Category:2002 software Category:Cross-platform free software Category:Articles containing video clips Category:Articles with example code Category:Multilingual websites Category:Version control systems Category:Advertising-free websites Category:Collaborative software